• Best Intro to SBCs

  Raspberry Pi 5

  CPU

  Arm Cortex-A76 (quad-core, 2.4GHz)

  Memory

  Up to 8GB LPDDR4X SDRAM

  Operating System

  Raspberry Pi OS (official)

  Ports

  2× USB 3.0, 2× USB 2.0, Ethernet, 2x micro HDMI, 2× 4-lane MIPI transceivers, PCIe Gen 2.0 interface, USB-C, 40-pin GPIO header

  GPU

  VideoCore VII

  Starting Price

  $60

  The Raspberry Pi 5 is the first SBC people look to when planning out a project. It has a huge community supporting it and large number of compatible accessories available to customize it to your needs.

  $60 at Adafruit $60 at CanaKit
• Most power for the price

  Orange Pi 5 Pro 16GB LPDDR5

  Brand

  Orange Pi

  CPU

  Rockchip RK3588S (octo-core 2.4GHz)

  Memory

  16GB LPDDR5

  Operating System

  Orange Pi OS (Droid), Orange Pi OS (Arch), Ubuntu, Debian, Android 12

  Ports

  1 × USB 3.0, 3 × USB 2.0, 1 × Gigabit Ethernet, 3.5 mm audio input/output

  Display

  1 × HDMI 2.1, 1 × HDMI 2.0, 1 × MIPI DSI 4 lane

  The Orange Pi 5 Pro is a powerful SBC well-suited to almost any task. Although it's not as popular as the Raspberry Pi 5 and doesn't enjoy the same massive community, it's can do everything the RPi5 can, only faster.

  $128 at Amazon $118 at Aliexpress

No other single-board computer (SBC) maker dominates the market like Raspberry Pi does, but there are alternatives out there. When it comes to form and function, no other company comes for the Raspberry Pi’s market share more tenaciously than Orange Pi. Raspberry Pi has the Zero 2 W, Orange Pi has Zero 2W. Raspberry Pi has the 3B+, Orange Pi has the 3B Plus. Raspberry Pi’s latest SBC is the 5, and Orange Pi has the 5, 5B, 5 Plus, 5 Pro, and 5 Max. And of the Orange Pi 5 series SBCs, the 5 Pro most closely aligns with the form of the Raspberry Pi 5.

Both devices are flagship SBCs capable of handling almost any task you throw at them, but when you run the numbers, the Orange Pi has the edge with better specs almost every time. Still, Raspberry Pi is the king of the SBC mountain, and it will take more than numbers to unseat it. Two SBCs enter the ring, and by law, only one can leave victorious.

Price, specs, and availability

When it comes to price, the Raspberry Pi 5 is the clear winner. The Raspberry Pi with 8GB of RAM will cost you around $80, while the Orange Pi with 8GB costs around $100 on Amazon or $90 on AliExpress. With that extra money you save, you could buy a HAT, a case, or a heatsink for your Raspberry Pi.

Both have 2.4GHz processors with GPUs that support OpenGL and Vulkan, but the Orange Pi has 8 cores instead of 4. The RPi memory comes in either 2GB, 4GB, or 8GB varieties, whereas the OPi has 4GB, 8GB, and 16GB boards available. However, even if both boards had equal memory, the OPi uses LPDDR5 RAM as opposed to LPDDR4X, which is 50% faster and has a lower power consumption.

Of the two, the RPi is easier to get. The best way to get the Orange Pi 5 Pro is to order it off of AliExpress, which can have inconsistent shipping speeds. The Raspberry Pi 5 can be picked up at a number of retail businesses as well as Amazon.

• 	Raspberry Pi 5	Orange Pi 5 Pro 16GB LPDDR5
  CPU	Arm Cortex-A76 (quad-core, 2.4GHz)	Rockchip RK3588S (octo-core 2.4GHz)
  Memory	Up to 8GB LPDDR4X SDRAM	16GB LPDDR5
  Operating System	Raspberry Pi OS (official)	Orange Pi OS (Droid), Orange Pi OS (Arch), Ubuntu, Debian, Android 12
  Ports	2× USB 3.0, 2× USB 2.0, Ethernet, 2x micro HDMI, 2× 4-lane MIPI transceivers, PCIe Gen 2.0 interface, USB-C, 40-pin GPIO header	1 × USB 3.0, 3 × USB 2.0, 1 × Gigabit Ethernet, 3.5 mm audio input/output
  GPU	VideoCore VII	Arm Mali-G610
  Wireless Connectivity	Bluetooth 5.0, Dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi	Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 5.0, BLE

Design and form factor

The Orange Pi 5 Pro is a tad larger than the Raspberry Pi 5, coming in at 89mm × 56mm compared to 85mm × 56mm. The Orange Pi is also a bit heavier at 62g compared to 46g. At a glance though, the biggest distinguishing characteristic between the two is the color of the PCB.

The Raspberry Pi has most of its ports, sockets, and silicon on top of the board, the only exception being the MicroSD card slot. The Orange Pi also has its SD card slot on the back, but it has an M.2 port, eMMC interface, two MIPI camera ports, and a spot for an SPI chip on the back as well.

The RPi gets the edge here because I don’t want to worry about damaging the FPC cable connecting my board to my cameras or damaging my NVMe drive when I set down my SBC. This is a minor gripe, however, because the issue can be solved by adding some standoffs to the through-holes at the corners.

Ports, I/O, and performance

Partial port parity

The two SBCs have many of the same ports. In particular, both have four USB-A ports, two HDMI ports, a gigabit Ethernet port, and a USB-C power port. The Raspberry Pi has 2 × USB 2.0 and 2 × USB 3.0, whereas the Orange Pi has 3 × USB 2.0 and 1 × USB 3.1. The RPi has micro HDMI ports (both 2.1), while the OPi has full-sized HDMI ports (1 × 2.0 and 1 × 2.1). The gigabit Ethernet on both boards can support power over Ethernet with a HAT, and the power needs for both are 5V/5A.

There are a few points of divergence as well. The RPi has a 16-pin PCIe port whereas the OPi has an M.2 slot on the back. Both limit their PCIe speeds to generation 2 with just 1 lane. The OPi has a 30-pin MIPI display slot and two MIPI camera ports. The RPi has two MIPI ports that can support either a display or a camera.

Both boards have 40-pin GPIOs with the same layout, although the OPi makes its GPIO pins color coded for easier hobbyist use. Both have fan and real-time clock sockets, though in slightly different places. The RPi has a dedicated UART port which the OPi lacks, but the OPi has 2 × USB 2.0 headers and a 3.5mm audio jack. Here the Orange Pi wins mostly for the full-size HDMI, but also for the headphone jack and user-friendly GPIO pins.

Games and AI

I tried very hard to play games on my Orange Pi, but I found success playing open-source games like SuperTuxKart on Debian, and installing emulators on the Android 12 build. The OPi struggled to run SuperTuxKart on the highest settings, but had no problems on the lowest settings. When running Wii games on Dolphin, the OPi didn’t struggle at all and performed flawlessly.

The situation was reversed when playing the same games on the Raspberry Pi. SuperTuxKart could handle higher settings on the RPi, but after getting Dolphin installed, it struggled with Wii games. Additionally, getting Dolphin installed and working on the Raspberry Pi was much more difficult than doing it on Orange Pi’s Android 12.

I was very surprised to find that the Raspberry Pi was significantly better than the Orange Pi when running the Ollama language model Llama3 (if you're willing to work for it, the Orange Pi is much faster). At base settings, with both systems running their first-party Debian builds, the Raspberry Pi was slightly faster every time. When it came to Raspberry Pi versus Orange Pi’s Arch build, it was more mixed. The real performance advantage for the RPi came when I overclocked it to 3GHz (something which may not be possible with the OPi). When the RPi was maxed out, it almost doubled the performance of the OPi.

Operating System

Sometimes less is more

The Raspberry Pi 5 and the Orange Pi 5 Pro are both capable of running many operating systems. The Raspberry Pi has one “official” operating system that it maintains (Raspberry Pi OS), while the Orange Pi has seven (Orange Pi OS (Arch), Orange Pi OS (OH), Orange Pi OS (Droid), OpenWRT, Debian, Ubuntu, and Android 12).

Of the OPi images available, I found the Android build to be the easiest to use “out of the box” because I could just jump in without any confusion about where things were or how they worked. The flip side is that Orange Pi doesn’t do you any favors when it comes to flashing Android on an SD card. If I were going to be using the OPi as a mini PC, I would choose either the Arch or Debian images because they come with a standard Windows-like GUI desktop, and I found it easy to get applications up and running there.

Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian) is essentially a finely tuned Debian build that’s purpose built to run on Raspberry Pi devices. Raspberry Pi also makes its own imager that has access to loads of OS images, so you can do a full RPiOS install with desktop and recommended programs, or you can go extra light with just the CLI and no frills.

Despite the fact that Orange Pi wins the numbers game when it comes to OS availability, I give the edge to Raspberry Pi not just because of its easy-to-use first-party imager, but also because of the massive community maintaining support for a number of different operating systems.

Raspberry Pi 5 vs. Orange Pi 5 Pro: Do you need the extra power?

The specs may be misleading

As of right now, the Orange Pi is not optimized to take advantage of its extra power (with more cores, more RAM, faster RAM) because its performance is matched or exceeded by the Raspberry Pi in almost every test I put them through. Of course, it’s still relatively early on for the Orange Pi 5 Pro, and it’s entirely possible that it is being held back by missteps in OS implementations, whereas the Raspberry Pi enjoys a surfeit of software optimizations that unlock its potential.

That brings me to another reason that the RPi is the better purchase. Raspberry Pi has a massive community behind it, meaning that if you have a problem, there are lots of experts out there who can help you get up and running with it.

The Orange Pi clearly has the better specifications on-paper, but it suffers from poor implementation, a higher price, and a much smaller community of enthusiasts supporting it. Unless you’re a power user who knows how to unlock the extra horsepower the Orange Pi has, you’re better off getting the Raspberry Pi 5 right now.